Sorry, but your problem does not imply a bug in PHP itself.  For a
list of more appropriate places to ask for help using PHP, please
visit http://www.php.net/support.php as this bug system is not the
appropriate forum for asking support questions.  Due to the volume
of reports we can not explain in detail here why your report is not
a bug.  The support channels will be able to provide an explanation
for you.

Thank you for your interest in PHP.

You have a parse error in your second block of code.
eval('$foo='.$foo.' 1;var_dump($foo);');

Essentially you have
$foo = 9994!!!!! 1; var_dump($foo);

Thank you for your quick reply.

> You have a parse error in your second block of code.
> eval('$foo='.$foo.' 1;var_dump($foo);');
> 
> Essentially you have
> $foo = 9994!!!!! 1; var_dump($foo);

I beg to differ. Please look again.

There is no parse error in the second block.

$foo contains 9994 times the "!" followed by "1".

Please check again with the following code.

<?php
for($foo='',$i=0;$i<9994;$i++) {
  $foo.='!';
}
echo strlen($foo)."<br/>\n";
$bar = '$foo='.$foo.' 1;var_dump($foo);';
echo $bar."<br/>\n";
eval($bar);
?>

And as I mentioned before the example runs absolutely fine (no parse rror, no memory exhausted error) when lowering 9994 to 9993.

The parser currently has a stack size limit of 10000.

AFAIK this means that the parser cannot handle more than this number of tokens in the same expression.

If you need more you can change that by defining YYMAXDEPTH to a larger number in zend_language_parser.y.

It is not eval() specific.

Thanks a lot for your response. I can see clearer now...